What Will We Choose?
Meditations
I haven’t been sleeping very well.
Alright, a couple of caveats - first, I’ve been getting over COVID this week (hence no post last Monday).
Second, I have actually never in my whole life slept very well. I was bad at nap time as a small child. As a teenager/young adult I mostly gave up on trying. When the pandemic hit, and I was spending whole nights not sleeping at all, I decided that something must be done. I started taking melatonin regularly and developed a militant bedtime routine that involved about two hours of decompressing, stretching, and reading. I finally got into a decent groove, and for the past few years I have, more often than not, been able to wrestle my brain into getting a decent amount of sleep regularly.
January of this year, it all started to fall apart. Right around January 20th in fact. I wonder what that could be about.
I didn’t sleep at all on election night last year, but after that I got back into the same stasis I had enjoyed before. I’ve always slept better once the bad thing has happened - there’s less to worry about. And so while my current sleep issues (once again having whole nights where I get zero - count them, ZERO hours of sleep, lots of nights where I get that weird half sleep where you probably dozed off because time is moving too quickly for you to be fully awake, but it doesn’t actually feel like sleep) may feel like a regression, it’s actually a completely reasonable reaction to our present circumstances. Bad things are happening all the time, but they are never over. It’s just a rolling series of bad things, each of which is a harbinger of more bad things to come.
I wonder sometimes if I’d sleep better if I paid less attention. Sometimes I actually wonder if I’d sleep better if I paid more attention, too. I’m a person who likes to know things. If you’re a person I love in real life and you’re experiencing some sort of medical issue, I will probably google it excessively. There may be scientific journals involved. So I do wonder sometimes if the answer is to get back on Twitter or obsess over a politics discord or keep MSNBC on in the background all the time. But mostly I know better.
But sometimes I also wonder about turning it off.
In Trump Era 2: The Reckoning, I’ve been trying for a little more moderation. The first time around I spent a lot of time feeling personally responsible for what was happening. I hadn’t really believed it was possible, and so I hadn’t really tried hard enough to stop it. Who knows what the world would look like if I, and people like me, hadn’t checked out? I spent a lot of time trying to claw back a sense of agency, a sense of empowerment. And for a while it worked. I was back in the game, and we blocked the ACA repeal, won elections in Virginia and New Jersey, won the midterms, won the presidency.
Lots of burnout, a massive election loss, and a general desire to be happier and less annoying later, and I have finally internalized that I cannot personally change the course of a Senate vote, an Executive Order, or an election.
But if that’s true, couldn’t I just stop? You know, entirely?
Honest answer: maybe! There are a lot of people all over the country who have, for reasons that make sense to me and reasons that don’t. And there are a lot of people all over the country who never started caring about politics or elections. In fact, much of the political project for both sides in the next few years will be figuring out how to reach those people, to find out what they care about and what will compel them to vote. And with so much bad shit happening all the time that we can’t change, with the knowledge that there are so many people and systems willfully and even joyfully facilitating absolutely grotesque betrayals of humanity, maybe it would be a relief. Maybe it would be easy.
So where does that leave me? In the messy middle, as always. Caught between full immersion and full disengagement. Believing that we have the power to make a difference but that it won’t always work. Knowing that every single day is a collection of difficult questions and even more difficult choices. What will make me feel better? What will make a difference? What do I need to know? Where do my skills line up with what’s needed? Do any of my skills line up with what’s needed? When do I take a break? What’s a break and what’s avoidance? What’s fear and what’s burnout? What’s fair? What’s useful? What’s right?
I want to say that this is the part that I’m bad at, the self reflection, the hard questions, the tough answers. But I think the reality is that it’s actually just really hard, and you can never really get good at it because being a person who cares in this world changes all the time. What the world needs, what you need, what’s possible - it’s chaotic and contradictory and there’s no single right answer.
The only constant is this: we have to choose.
It’s easy to let the world slip by in the miasma, but that too is a choice. We can choose to rest, to find something in the world to love and to fight for, to retreat into ourselves. We can choose to put our energy into our friends and our communities, to marches or conversations or storytelling or creating beautiful things. We can choose to love ourselves, to fight for ourselves, to carve out space for ourselves in a world that was not designed for us. We can choose kindness or not, courage or not, comfort or not. Every day, all the time, we get to choose.
I choose this.
I choose to believe that we can, even now, build a world where we can all thrive, where the role of government is to attend to our public goods - the health care, roads and bridges, schools and child care, science and technology that we all use and we all benefit from. I choose to believe that the more of us that come together, the more of us that share our experiences and fight for ourselves and our community, the more powerful we are. I choose to let the horrors of this administration break my heart, and I choose trying everyday to make other people see the possibility of a better, brighter, kinder world.
And I guess that means sometimes, I’m choosing not to sleep.
Ways to Help/Things Giving Me Hope This Week
This story about a town in a district that went for Trump by more than 20 points that stood up for three kids detained by ICE, and won.
Read and share this piece from Dan Pfeiffer and then call your Representative and Senators and ask them to take a stand for democracy. I found the advice about messaging in this piece to be particularly powerful and I hope you’ll use it to make the case to friends and family about how scary things are and how important it is to stand up to this administration.
Both the New Yorker and the New York Times published essays recently about having the courage to stand up to this administration. Neither piece is perfect, but both highlight important insights into standing up to this administration and represent institutions pushing back.
The cuts to food assistance programs around the country have food banks tightening their belts. FInd a food bank near you and make a monetary donation.